New York Can Protect Itself Without Federal Aid

By Edward Glaeser -
Nov 26, 2012

As New York looks to the future
after Hurricane Sandy, it must remember a great paradox of
cities. The world’s urban agglomerations are often particularly
vulnerable to natural and man-made disaster, yet they are also
especially well-suited to defend their space.

Cities from New York to Mumbai are often built on
continental edges, which can be dangerous precipices. At the
same time, New York can shield itself in a way that far-flung
exurbs can’t by building costly defenses, such as sea walls,
that can protect against all but the fiercest storms.

For most of human history, water-borne transport has been
vastly cheaper than movement over land. To reduce transport
costs, we built our cities on waterways.

After the Arab conquests of the 8th century, the
Mediterranean became a “Moslem lake,” and Europe turned inward
on itself. Its cities were built on inland waterways, such as
the Danube and the Rhine, far from the Atlantic or a continental
divide.

As Europeans grew stronger, with better boats and bolder
ambitions, they spread themselves across oceans and continents.
The ports of Holland, the world’s first great maritime urban
nation, faced the Atlantic and the threat of rising sea levels.
Dutch cities from New Amsterdam to Batavia (New York and
Jakarta) were right on the ocean, so that ships could more
easily carry goods to and from the Old World.

Sea Empires

The British East India Company, which followed the Dutch to
intercontinental trading eminence, was an even greater city
builder. Tens of millions of people now live in these former
trading settlements -- Singapore and Mumbai and Kolkata and
Karachi -- and the vicissitudes of the sea put them all at risk.

Since coasts often coincide with tectonic plates, many
cities also face the risk of earthquakes. Karachi and Kolkata
are both near fault lines and have experienced tremors this
year. Cities on the Pacific Ocean -- east (Tokyo and Manila) and
west (Valparaiso, Chile, and Los Angeles) -- are particularly
vulnerable.

The transportation-related advantages of sea coasts have
declined enormously over the past century, and one might have
expected humanity to move inland. Yet coastal cities continue to
exert a powerful pull. The U.S. is an increasingly coastal
nation, as people choose either milder temperatures or the
enduring productivity of our historical metropolitan masses,
such as New York. The cities of Asia, predominantly on the
coasts, have also expanded mightily as once-poor nations enrich
themselves through urbanization.

Eleven years ago, the terrorist attack on the World Trade
Center exposed the vulnerability of cities to man-made assaults.
Many worried that they would empty out as people fled in fear of
future strikes.

In that moment of vulnerability, the economist Jesse
Shapiro and I looked at the evidence and noted that cities could
be safe harbors as well as targets. An original advantage of
cities is that they are compact spaces that can be walled off
against marauders. An example is London, which, facing the
threat of Irish Republican Army attacks, guarded its dense
streets with a “ring of steel” including surveillance and
concrete barriers.

It is also far easier to imagine building sea walls to
protect the geographically limited area around cities than to
cover a sprawling coastline.

I am no civil engineer and have no opinion on whether New
York City should protect itself with massive walls or with less-
expensive, less-imposing defenses, but the city needs to shield
itself, and sea walls provide that barrier. The Dutch Delta
Program has spent billions to protect the Netherlands, largely
successfully.

Japan’s Lesson

Sea walls aren’t perfect, as Japan learned in 2011 when the
tsunami came crashing over barriers that were meant to protect
40 percent of the country’s coastline. That experience didn’t
prove that walls are useless. Rather, it showed they need to be
quite high to be effective and that countries should take other
sensible safety steps, such as putting nuclear reactors on high
ground.

Sea walls are expensive. One recent estimate is that they
cost $35 million per mile and require maintenance that costs
from 5 to 10 percent of that amount per year. At such a price,
protecting the entire mid-Atlantic region would be prohibitively
expensive, yet defending New York City would be affordable. A
great wall running from Sandy Hook in New Jersey to the Far
Rockaways would cost less than $500 million based on that
estimate.

Nothing in New York comes cheaply, however, and I suspect
that the estimate by the Dutch water-risk expert Jeroen Aerts
that it would cost $10 billion to build two barriers -- one
between Sandy Hook and the Rockaways and a second at the north
end of the East River -- is far closer to the mark. Aerts
himself suggests a $17 billion solution with three great walls,
and says that an extra $15 billion might be required in added
coastline protection.

Aerts’s total of $32 billion would be roughly half the
city’s annual budget. But the costs of Hurricane Sandy also ran
in the tens of billions. If the alternative is giving up on
lower Manhattan, which has hundreds of billions of dollars’
worth of property and infrastructure, the price looks downright
cheap. If the Netherlands can build a wall system that protects
an entire country that lies below sea level, then New York City
can protect itself.

Who should pay for these defenses? The protected property
owners, of course. There is no reason why New York should look
to the federal government in Washington for this spending.

The city has the money to pay the bill, and it should
champion the principle that we only build sea walls or other
barriers when the people who are protected pay for them. This
helps ensure that the benefits justify the costs. We don’t want
to go further down a path where every hamlet on the Eastern
seaboard feels it has a right to federally financed storm
protection.

Strong Government

Sea walls may not be the answer, but any solution is sure
to require huge public expenditures. This highlights another
central point about cities: They need strong, effective
governments.

Exit polls found that Mitt Romney, an advocate of laissez-
faire economics, received only 29 percent of the votes in big
cities, while President Barack Obama, who believes in big
government, won 69 percent of urbanites’ votes. That pattern
makes sense, since people in vulnerable cities need government
more than people in far-flung rural areas do (even though the
latter often get more per capita in federal subsidies).

Economist Matthew Kahn of UCLA has studied the death tolls
from natural disasters. He found that where governments are more
capable, fewer people die. This makes me worry about the fate of
cities in the developing world that are just as subject to
natural disasters as New York is but have governments far less
capable of taking effective precautionary measures. Kahn has
predicted that cities will be able to defend themselves against
the changes associated with climate change. While I am far less
certain about Karachi, I am optimistic enough to think he is
right about New York.

For my confidence to be validated, however, New York needs
to spend billions to defend its vulnerable real estate. We have
to stop denigrating mega-projects and resurrect the spirit of
the city’s master builder, Robert Moses. If it does this right,
New York can again provide a model of safety amid threatening
storms for the cities of America and the rest of the world.

(Edward Glaeser, an economics professor at Harvard
University, is a Bloomberg View columnist. He is the author of
“Triumph of the City.” The opinions expressed are his own.)
Read more opinion online from Bloomberg View. Subscribe to
receive a daily e-mail highlighting new View editorials, columns
and op-ed articles.